Did farming arise from a misapplication of social intelligence?

Abstract

The origins of farming is the defining event of human history--the one turning point that has resulted in modern humans having a quite different type of lifestyle and cognition to all other animals and past types of humans. With the economic basis provided by farming, human individuals and societies have developed types of material culture that greatly augment powers of memory and computation, extending the human mental capacity far beyond that which the brain alone can provide. Archaeologists have long debated and discussed why people began living in settled communities and became dependent on cultivated plants and animals, which soon evolved into domesticated forms. One of the most intriguing explanations was proposed more than 20 years ago not by an archaeologist but by a psychologist: Nicholas Humphrey suggested that farming arose from the 'misapplication of social intelligence'. I explore this idea in relation to recent discoveries and archaeological interpretations in the Near East, arguing that social intelligence has indeed played a key role in the origin of farming and hence the emergence of the modern world.

Figure 1

The domain-specific intelligence of the Neanderthal mind (Mithen 1996).

Figure 2

Cognitive fluidity is characteristic of the modern mind–a capacity to integrate ways of thinking and stores of knowledge to generate creative ideas and which underlies the pervasive use of metaphor and analogy in human thought (Mithen 1996). This figure illustrates how cognitive fluidity gave rise to the art, ideology and technology of the Upper Palaeolithic.

Figure 3

Eight primary centres for the origins of agriculture with approximate dates for the first domesticates (Smith 1995; Mithen 2003).

Figure 4

Guilá Naquitz, Oaxaca Valley, Mexico, undergoing excavation in 1966 (© Kent Flannery).

Figure 5

The environmental and cultural sequence of the southern Levant during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene. The line is based on oxygen isotope ratios used as a proxy for global temperature.

Figure 6

Tell el-Sultan, surrounded by the modern settlement of Jericho in Palestine (September 1999 (© Steven Mithen)).

Figure 7

The Pre-Pottery Neolithic B site of Ghuwyer 1, Wadi Faynan, southern Jordan. This shows the typical architecture for the Middle PPNB period with rectangular structures densely packed together (© Alan Simmons).

Figure 8

The Levant showing the location of key Pre-Pottery Neolithic A sites, and the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B sites of Çayönü and Çatalhöyük.

Figure 9

Göbekli Tepe, southern Turkey, undergoing excavation by Klaus Schmidt in October 2003 (© Steven Mithen).

Figure 10

Stone pillar incised with image of a fox at Göbekli Tepe (© Steven Mithen).

Figure 11

View looking eastwards from the summit of Göbekli Tepe towards the Karacadağ hills where geneticists have pinpointed the earliest strains of domesticated wheat (© Steven Mithen).

Figure 12

Wadi Faynan, southern Jordan. The Pre-Pottery Neolithic site of WF16 covers the two knolls in the foreground. The white Landrover is adjacent to Trench 2 (see figure 14), while the circular dwellings found in Trench 3 (see figure 13) are located on the knoll in the immediate foreground (© Steven Mithen).

Figure 13

Circular stone structures within Trench 3 at WF16. Structures of this type are typical of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A period. They are likely to have been the base of dwellings with walls made from timber, reeds and hides (© Steven Mithen).

Figure 14

Human secondary burial, initially placed within a plaster floor of a small circular stone structure within Trench 2 at WF16. The burial was adjacent to a large grinding stone also embedded within the floor. During the use life of the structure, which may have been a period of several hundred years, the burial was periodically opened and bone either inserted or removed (© Steven Mithen).

Figure 15

‘Non-utilitarian’ ground stone items from WF16. Objects with geometric designs and figurines are typical of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A from the southern Levant.

Figure 16

Grinding stones from WF16. The deep cop-hole mortars are typical of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A period.

Figure 17

Pestles from WF16.

Figure 18

Processors from WF16.

Figure 19

Ground stone item from WF16. This appears to be either an unfinished pestle, a phallus or an object which has deliberately ambiguous associations.